For many people the world over, today is the holiest day of the year. According to the Jewish calendar, today is Yom Kippur or the Day of Atonement.

This holiday is observed through a day-long fast and a great deal of praying and repenting. Including most notably, a confessional prayer called Al Chet. Jews pray today, the culminating day of the ten days of awe, that their names will be sealed in the book of life for the coming year.

On this Yom Kippur in the Hebrew year of 5774, my dear friend Drew Serres of Organizing Change and I decided to refocus the community of congregants. Instead of Jews focusing on sins outlined in the Bible. What kind of list might we generate for our audience of people who are united not by religion but rather a drive to create change beauty and justice in the world?

The Jewish confession is less about what you personally did wrong over the past year and more focused on what the Jewish people as a collective have done. It’s communal.

If you choose to adopt a more Universalist outlook, as I do, this repentance demands that believers be not only accountable for their own actions, but the actions of well, really, humankind.

Consider the following a list of human failings that we commit in acting for social change and humanitarian efforts.

2. Focusing on a single issue (e.g. climate change and health care reform) as opposed to working for intersectional, and cross-issue campaigns/projects.

3. Engaging in campaigns that are sexy rather than campaigns that are more impactful but garner less limelight.

4. Expecting our reason and facts should be enough to convince people we are right (i.e. talking atsomeone), rather than just talking to individuals like you would to “A Friend in a Bar” (i.e. talking with someone).

5. Looking down on activists whose passions we do not share (“How can someone care so much about animal treatment when people are dying in _____?!”).

6. Getting angry at people who aren’t active agents of change or advocates for social justice (i.e. people we may call apathetic).

36. Edging out others less experienced from taking leadership opportunities because we think we can get the job done more efficiently.

37. Putting a completely balanced amount of effort into everything you do, when really it is more about juggling (i.e. the amount of time you put into your priorities can fluctuate [e.g. maybe this week I spend more time with family/friends and next week I focus on the campaign]).

We asked in the intro what kind of list we might generate by realigning the audience on this holiest of holy days. While I hope you’ve found it illuminating, one larger question still persists;

What do we do with this list?

If this list has only weighed you down with the collective failings of those trying hardest to do good in the world then you have missed the point. Nor was this merely an exercise to humble those who take pride in doing good things.

The point is to strive. We are human, we have failings, and we also have the capacity to overcome them. But we cannot overcome a failing until we have identified it.

So what we at Organizing Change and Advance Humanity would encourage you to do right now is reflect on this list and remember one or two errors that resonated with you personally and make a conscious effort to change that behavior in this new year. In Hebrew this final step of repentance is called Teshuvah.

After all, the very word Chet in Hebrew while commonly translated to sin actually means “to miss the mark”. So take this year, and give it another shot.

As discussed earlier this repentance is at once both individual and communal, so if you feel so moved, we encourage you to share this post with our ever-growing congregation of change agents, do-gooders and everyday humanitarians.

We would love to hear your own ideas for other common ways in which we miss the mark in our efforts to make change and foster the promise of a better world in the comments section or on Facebook.

Drew Serres

Drew Serres began working on Organizing Change to combine his dedication to showing impactful organizing practices with his passion for learning. Find out more about him at the About Page and see his updates on Twitter and Google+